Newsletter-537-December-2015

No.
537 DECEMBER
2015 Edited
by Don Cooper

Doesn't time go quickly, here we are in the middle of November looking
forward to that end-of-year holiday period again!! Do the years go faster as we
get older? It seems like only yesterday
that I edited last December’s one!

May
I, on behalf of the HADAS community, wish you and yours the compliments of the
season and a healthy, happy and prosperous 2016.

All the above events, unless otherwise stated, will be held at Stephens
House & Gardens (formerly Avenue House), 17 East End Road, Finchley N3 3QE,
starting at 8pm, with tea/coffee and biscuits afterwards. Non-members are
welcome (£1.00). Buses 82, 125, 143, 326 and 460 pass nearby. Finchley Central
Station (Northern Line) is a short walk away.

Church
Farm House by
Don Cooper

Church Farm House, Hendon (formerly Church Farm House
Museum) is STILL vacant. The museum was closed in March, 2011, so it won’t be
long until the 4th anniversary of its closing. We are being assured
by Barnet Council that it is secure and being properly maintained and Historic
England have not felt it necessary to add it to the buildings-at-risk register
published last month (October 2015). Negotiations, we are told, are proceeding
with Middlesex University but have yet to result in the signing of a lease.

Recent discoveries
about Roman Britain By
Peter Pickering

On 7th November I went to a
conference organised by the Roman Society and the Association for Roman
Archaeology. There were four lectures describing very recent excavations with
remarkable new discoveries from Roman Britain. One was of a late Roman temple
site in south-west Wiltshire, with a spectacular set of finds, especially
miniature amphorae and hammers, and a large number of coins, over 30 of which
have iron nails in them - perhaps originally attached to pieces of cloth, or
hammered into a wooden post. There are also some lead curse tablets. But no
indication, as yet, of what god or gods might have been worshipped there.

Professor Michael Fulford took us
over the eighteen years of his excavation of part of Insula

IX of Silchester, which has finally
come to an end, discovering so much more than the Society of Antiquaries had
been able to find at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We
were all fascinated by the evidence of a flourishing business of skinning dogs,
presumably to make fur cloaks - a knife was found carved with an image of
mating dogs. It seemed at the end that Professor Fulford was weaning himself
and his students slowly from the excavation, having done some work on another
insula, re-excavating some of the trenches of the Society of Antiquaries.

Sam Moorhead then gave an account of
the Romans west of Exeter.

Although he was standing in for a
lecturer who had been prevented from telling us about Binchester, the 'Pompeii
of the North', no-one would have guessed this from his polished and fluent
presentation. The discovery of the site at Ipplepen was due to two active and
responsible metal detectorists (who recorded the GPS data for the many coins
they found). The coins demonstrated that the Romans had not lost interest after
they got to Exeter; geophysical surveying and excavation has already found many
archaeological features over several acres, including a roadside cemetery. The
dig has a strong community focus. Finally, Andrew Birley told us about the most
recent work at Vindolanda, which continues to be one of the most important
Roman sites in the country. He is the third generation of Birleys to work
there. Among the finds he described were a gold coin of Nero, and the wooden
toilet seat. The anaerobic conditions in parts of the site continue to reveal
wooden writing tablets and other things which are usually lost. It looks as if
the Vindolanda excavations will continue for many years.

The
Sandridge Hoard by
Jean Lamont

Members of HADAS may be interested to know that the
Sandridge Hoard has now been conserved and has gone on display at the
Verulamium Museum in St Albans. The Museum is open all year round and every day
(Monday to Saturday from 10.00 to 17.30 and Sunday from 14.00 to 17.30), for
public holidays such as Christmas check with the Museum, tel. 01727 751 810.

The Sandridge Hoard consists of 159 gold solidi and is the
largest collection of solidi ever found in this country: they date from 375-408
AD and represent more wealth than most people could earn in a lifetime. There
is no trace of the original container. The guidebook suggests a connection with
one of the local villas and mentions Turnershall Farm a few miles away, itself
subject of a separate display. Well worth a visit.

Lyndhurst
Trip – continued

Our aim on our trips is to visit a variety of places
without spending too long on the coach. These cover a range of interests, with
twenty of our travellers submitting interesting newsletter contributions about
our stops, and related topics. Our thanks to all who have put pen to
paper.

Day 2 started with one of our longer excursions – one hour
to Stonehenge.

Visit to Stonehenge Liz
Gapp

Our coach dropped us at Stonehenge in time for entry timed for
10.30. As the threatened rain was holding off, most of us decided to get the
shuttle bus to visit the monument first, before visiting the visitor centre.
Some people walked the 1¼ miles to the site; some later also walked back.

We had all been provided with audio tour
guides. There were numbers on the site which went from 1 to 8 corresponding to
the audio descriptions. These descriptions also gave additional numbers for
more detailed information about specific aspects. The descriptions pointed out
that Stonehenge is the only stone circle with lintels; there are 300 later
mounds around the circle using it as a focal point; the monument is not a true
henge as the ditch is inside the defensive mound, not outside it; it was all
built over a period dating 3,000 - 2,000 BC; the famous bluestones reputedly
from the Preseli Hills in Wales are the smaller of the upright stones, the
larger ones being the Sarsen stones from a more local area, most likely the
Marlborough Downs in North Wiltshire; the stones had been rearranged at various
times in the past. As you walk round the
circle of the monument various features such as the Heel Stone and the
Slaughter Stone are described. You are kept to the edge of the monument by
barriers, as the archaeology inside the barriers is deemed too fragile to be
walked on.

Talking to people who knew the site from previous visits,
it was felt the new approach, whether by shuttle bus or foot, was more
atmospheric and a good way to enter the landscape.

After returning to the interpretive centre
(around midday), we went to the café and ate our
lunch. Then we went to the exhibition, not large but with quite a few
interesting video displays. After this we briefly walked round the
reconstructed village of round houses. There we also saw two sample bluestones
and a Sarsen stone, the latter in a frame to enable it to be moved. This was so
that it was possible to feel the difference between the two stone types. The
Sarsen frame was set up with a challenge for people to try and move it, with
pressure gauges to highlight how much effort it would take to move it, and
showing that in practice it would have
taken 200 people to move it.

We returned to the coach just after 13.00,
although it wasn't due to depart until 13.30. We were lucky, the rain had held
off until just as we were due to leave the site, despite forecasts predicting
an earlier start to the rain. Although not the warmest, it was a very enjoyable
and rewarding visit.

Old
Sarum Peter
Nicholson

The grey skies which had threatened, but mercifully held
off during our visit to Stonehenge began to rain at a sprinkle on the coach
trip to Old Sarum, then dampened us more and more. This curtailed both the time
we spent on site and the proportion of it we explored.

The boundaries of the site are those
of an Iron Age hillfort probably from about 400 BC.

When the Normans arrived, ready-made defences seemed a
bonus too good to ignore and William the Conqueror raised a motte and bailey
castle inside in about 1070. Our access was easy – the coach park is in the
outer bailey, so no need to climb a hill as at Danebury. The view in front of
us was impressive. A deep ditch was crossed by a modern wooden bridge and,
rising above us, the inner bailey with rubble cores of walls of extensive
ranges of buildings remaining.

Besides castles, the Normans were great cathedral builders
and, at Old Sarum, they built two in quick succession inside the hill fort. The
first, begun about 1075 was small by their standards with three apses at the
east end. The second, larger, cathedral is shown by the rubble cores of its
walls, which remain to a little above ground level. The wall lines of the first
cathedral, where they do not coincide, are shown by lines of modern paving.

Time moved on and so, unusually, did the cathedral. A
hilltop site exposed to extremes of weather and inconvenient for trade had
obvious disadvantages. Proximity to a Royal castle, which was politically
advantageous in the eleventh century, had ceased to be so in the thirteenth
when the Pope had excommunicated the King. After years of dissatisfaction and
discord, the foundation stone of the present cathedral, on its site in the river
valley below, was laid in 1220. After the cathedral went downhill, literally,
Old Sarum did so metaphorically, suffering depopulation, and eventually became
notorious as one of the rottenest of rotten boroughs.

Lyndhurst

With the inclement weather, we opted to return to the
hotel. The rain having relented, it gave an opportunity for a brief walk around
Lyndhurst itself. The town is quite small, with roads that do not lend
themselves to modern traffic with frequent queues of traffic for some 400 yards
from the traffic lights onto the High Street. Our hotel was at the northern end
of the town opposite some open ground.

Race Course View by Vicki
Baldwin

Although the ‘view’ is now open ground where the New Forest
ponies come to graze, in the 18th Century there really was a popular
racecourse here that appears on contemporary maps and continued in use until
the 1880s.

The
Custards Vicki
Baldwin

Opposite the hotel a turning, Race Course View, had a sign
stating that it led to The Custards, which turned out to be a rather
unremarkable road with houses on either side.
It seemed a very strange name so I started to look on-line for an
explanation. The reason given on the
website for ‘Rhubarb Cottage, The Custards, Lyndhurst (I know, I know!) was
that there had been orchards on the site and the apples were eaten with
custard. This seemed rather an odd link
until I remembered that there was a variety of cooking apple named
Costard. It would seem rather more
logical that ‘The Custards’ is a corruption of ‘The Costards’ and these were
the apples grown in the orchards.

Lecture by Dr Caroline Cartwright from Department of
Scientific Research at the British Museum.

The speaker’s primary areas of scientific expertise were
identification and interpretation of organics such as wood, charcoal, fibres
and other plant remains, shell, ivory and bones from all areas and time periods
in the British Museum’s collections. She has led expeditions in many parts of
the world.

The quite technical talk was illustrated with digital
images of many of the objects under investigation. The many techniques used in
analysis and investigation were discussed. She highlighted the fact that the
processes used for this apply pre-excavation, during excavation and
post-excavation as well as in conservation. Also highlighted was the need for
outreach with emphasis on the requirement to publish results in an
understandable form both in print and online; and to stage exhibitions.

The advance in analysis techniques including ever more
sophisticated microscopes in the last couple of decades has been phenomenal and
the hardware and software required mean an expenditure of many millions of
pounds. Very few organisations can afford this expenditure.

The storage and archiving of objects is important as future
techniques not yet discovered may well enable more information to be extracted
from these objects.

The meeting, which was well attended, concluded with a
question and answer session. Dr Caroline Cartwright was thanked for a very
interesting lecture.

CROSSRAIL at Liverpool Street

We have a lecture in March 2016 on
the Archaeology discovered during the Crossrail project. Here is a taster from
the Crossrail website

The Bedlam burial ground was in use from 1569 to at least
1738, spanning the start of the

British Empire, civil wars, the Restoration, Shakespeare’s
plays, the Great Fire of London and numerous plague outbreaks. 2015 marks the
350th anniversary of London’s last Great Plague in 1665 and archaeologists hope
that tests on excavated plague victims will help understand the evolution of
the plague bacteria strain.

The Bedlam burial ground, also known as Bethlem and the New
Churchyard, is located at the western end of Liverpool Street. Over 20,000 Londoners
are believed to have been buried at Bedlam between 1569 and 1738. It got its
name from the nearby Bethlehem Hospital which housed the mentally ill, although
only a small number of Bedlam residents are believed to have been buried there.

In June last year Crossrail invited 16 volunteers to scour
parish records from across the capital to create the first extensive list of
people buried at Bedlam.

The Roman remains that archaeologists uncovered at
the Liverpool Street station tell a very different story fromthe Bedlam burial ground skeletons. Initially, skulls
found in a small river channel were interpreted as wash-out from a Roman
cemetery somewhere upstream. But the
discovery in May 2015 of a reused cooking pot full of cremated human bones
changed archaeologists’ minds…..

Be sure and put a note in your diaries for what I’m sure
will be an exciting lecture.

A
Member’s Lecture by
Don Cooper

Stewart Wild is giving a lecture to the Mill Hill
Historical Society at Trinity Church, Mill

Hill Broadway, on 13th January
2016 at 14.30 to 16.00 on the following subject: “History of Stevens’ ink and
its Finchley connection”

Other
Societies’ Events by
Eric Morgan

Thursday, 7th
January 2016 at 10.30 am. Pinner Local History Society, Town Hall, Chapel